The film Anha (About Her) is having its commercial release in cinemas. Written and directed by Islam Al-Azazi, the film was produced in 2020, when it competed in the Cairo International Film Festival’s official competition. It is a unique piece of cinematic art, powerful despite its technical faults.
The theme of dealing with loss is not new to cinema, and has been tackled in films from all over the world. One especially beautiful example of the genre is L’attesa (The Wait), directed by Piero Messina, starring Juliette Binoche, which documents a mother’s response to news of the loss of her son stage by stage. Anha is similar in subject matter, but it takes an entirely different and far less conventional route.
The film opens with an intimate scene between Durriya (Nada El-Shazli) and Abbas (Salah Fahmi), their passionate intensity reflecting a deep love and powerful connection.
During this early scene, after professing his love, Abbas confides in Durriya that he fears her supernatural abilities. “People are afraid of what they cannot comprehend,” he says.
As the opening scene wraps up and the main narrative begins, the viewer sees Durriya arriving home in black attire accompanied by her brother Fahmi (Ahmed Malek). Gradually, it is revealed that Abbas has died in a car accident. Durriya and Fahmi were at the memorial service held in his honour.
The 85-minute drama is set in the early 1930s as revealed by a letter from the palace that Durriya reads out loud, in which King Fouad I informs Abbas that he has been honoured with the Order of the Nile of the fifth grade. Durriya stumbles a little while reading towards the end. Sitting down, she asks her brother how many grades of the Order of the Nile there are, and he answers falteringly, “Five.”
Fahmi asks his sister to have lunch with her, smelling the delicious food being cooked by her maid Fatma (Fadwa Abed), meanwhile attempting to start conversations about the family to distract her from her grief, but she remains unresponsive. Abruptly, Fatma comes in to offer them some juice and water, and once a glass of water is placed in front of her, an unusual vapour begins to bubble in Durriya’s glass as she looks at it, stopping only when she closes her eyes. This alarms Fahmi, who dismisses Fatma. Apart from her ability to withstand pain and survive madness at the end — which need not be supernatural as such — this is the only evidence of her supernatural powers that the screenplay provides.
Over a sumptuous lunch in which Durriya appears unbalanced, she asks her brother if he can dismiss Fatma for some time while she deals with her sadness. Fahmi is against that decision, however, and Fatma appears to be staying. It also emerges that Fahmi doesn’t like Abbas, and Durriya ends up kicking him out for pointing out that Abbas wasn’t as innocent as he seemed; he was involved in palace intrigues, and the accident was actually an assassination. After Fahmi leaves, she and Fatma are seen sorting out Abbas’s cloths in a scene that reveals her grief-stricken confusion and her deep need to be alone. She and Fatma later starts to clean a huge amount of silverware, and she starts sewing, rearranging the furniture, and eventually removing the china from its cabinets and placing it on the floor.
The film’s minimal dialogue, set entirely within Durriya’s house, aims for a 1930s tone but at times falls unnaturally stilted. This is perhaps the weakest aspect of the script, which explores Durriya’s inner life in a compelling way. Strategic flashbacks and long visual sequences — all within the house — are far more emotionally potent and effective at conveying information. At some point we realise Durriya is pregnant, and her grief journey is also her path to motherhood.
A new level of pain afflicts Durriya after she moves the furniture of the house and arranges all her tableware on the floor. She is seen hysterically running over the china back and forth, which may be an attempt to lose her child but probably isn’t. She ends up injuring her feet, and when Fatma arrives the next day she realises that Durriya is in need of help.
During one of their conversations, Fatma tries to comfort Durriya with a delicious meal that they end up eating together on the floor. With strange conversations between the two women, philosophical questions about life and love, motherhood and survival are raised. But at the end of that conversation Durriya tells Fatma not to come back to the house, and Fatma agrees to defer to her judgement even though she realises that, considering her condition, this is the wrong decision.
Photography by Abdel-Salam Moussa brilliantly complements the meagre but brilliantly utilised resources of the single, indoor setting. Moussa manages to create new horizons inside the house, using the sun beams that come into the house to illuminate Durriya and illustrate her mental state at various points.
During his second visit Fahmi answers a question Durriya asks him, evidently having grown to accept the truth about her husband. Reluctantly Fahmi informs her that Abbas was assassinated because he used his medical expertise to supervise the torture of two young revolutionaries from good family, creating totures that were “neither fatal nor bearable” – that was his way of currying favour with the palace – and when the prisoners were freed, apparently by mistake, the secret police averted a scandal by arranging for his covert assassination.
The closing scene features Durriya running out of the shower in her sleeping gown and storming out of the house.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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